At our San Diego event on April 25, 2024, we had some fantastic discussions with data and analytics leaders from diverse industries that included retail, healthcare, media, and government. Here were some of the key takeaways from the event, but the main theme was simple: first, get the data basics right.
- AI is a strategic imperative, but many companies struggle to even get the basics of data infrastructure in place. This can cause friction (and perhaps some confusion) between must-have and nice-to-have priorities.
- There is a lot of renewed buzz around conversational analytics as part of self-service. However, the biggest blocker to successful adoption is in knowing what to ask and having a sense for whether the underlying models and data are available to answer those questions. In addition, data literacy continues to be a barrier that is difficult to overcome.
- Serving internal business stakeholders can be challenging because of the iterative nature of the collaboration required to arrive at insights. Many data and analytics teams struggle to elicit requirements and the "why" behind business requests.
There was no consistency in solutions to these known challenges, often because the problems are highly contextualized to each company. The people, processes, and tooling can be quite varied. This results in bespoke solutions that sometimes do not scale, even within the same organization! On the other hand, the pain points were quite similar across the board and they included: overburdened and underfunded central data / analytics teams, translating the technical investments into business impact, and the need for better business-data collaboration.
